Jaykob Knazur pulled into the Andrean High School parking lot at 5 a.m. on a Friday morning not quite sure what he was walking into. He had heard enough to know it was bad. He hadn’t heard enough to know just how bad. Standing in the early morning dark at the corner of Broadway and East 59th Avenue in Merrillville, Indiana, the school’s principal looked at what the night had left behind and found a single word: heartbreaking.
The tornadoes that tore through Illinois and northwest Indiana on Thursday evening were part of a wider outbreak, one of those meteorological events that feels almost impossible until it’s standing right in front of you. The National Weather Service in Chicago clocked winds as high as 80 miles per hour in the area. At Andrean, the storm hit the north side of the building with particular fury — punching through the roof, shattering windows, and uprooting nearly every tree on campus. Knazur described it as devastating. There wasn’t really another word for it.
By the time contractors arrived Friday morning to board up the windows and begin clearing the worst of the debris, the insurance company was already on campus. The scene had that particular stillness that follows destruction — the kind where people move carefully, speak quietly, and take stock before they speak at all. “It’s still very raw to see it,” Knazur said, and it’s hard not to feel that in the way he said it. Not as a prepared statement, but as a man who genuinely loved the place he was standing in.
What makes a school more than a building is exactly the kind of thing that gets tested on mornings like this one. Andrean, a Catholic school with deep roots in the northwest Indiana community, has been around long enough to mean something to several generations of families. Alumni began reaching out almost immediately, offering help, money, muscle, presence. “We have a tight-knit community,” Knazur said. That word — tight-knit — gets thrown around a lot. It appeared as though he truly meant it in this instance.
There was one more thing Knazur noticed as he walked the campus that morning, something that caught even him off guard. The tornado had touched seemingly everything. Every structure on the north side of campus bore some kind of mark. Every tree. Every window. Except one. The crucifix and the Grotto on the north side of the building — left completely untouched. “The only thing spared,” Knazur said. Whether you read that as coincidence or something more, it’s the kind of detail that lingers.
Meanwhile, the 59ers — Andrean’s baseball team, nine-time state champions and one of the most decorated programs in Indiana history — had a semistate semifinal game to play Saturday at LaPorte. There’s something almost absurd about that timeline. Your school gets torn apart on Thursday night, your principal is standing in the wreckage at five in the morning on Friday, and by Saturday afternoon your team is on the field playing at 1:30 against DeKalb. But Knazur didn’t want to cancel. “We’re doing what we need to do,” he said. It’s possible that playing the game was its own kind of answer to the storm.
Andrean’s official statement, released Friday, asked people to stay away from campus for now — downed power lines, broken glass, unstable structures. It closed with something worth reading twice: “Andrean is about people, not infrastructure.” That’s easy to say. It’s harder to mean it when you’re standing in a parking lot at dawn, watching contractors haul debris from a school you’ve spent your career inside. Knazur seemed to mean it.
The broader outbreak is still being assessed. At least four tornadoes touched down across Illinois and Indiana that night. In Streator, Illinois, an EF-3 was confirmed — wind speeds between 136 and 165 mph. A man was pulled from the rubble of his home by a storm chaser and two police officers. Hundreds of thousands lost power. Flights were delayed out of Midway. Thursday night’s scope is still developing and being charted. But at Andrean, on a Friday morning in Merrillville, the scale was already perfectly, painfully clear.
